Secrets from the Grave

CHAPTER 1

A firm pull of the trigger, a blast, and the grasp releases; sending the clay pigeon tumbling to the ground, unbroken. In the shade of the skeet machine, the stillness of the woods kept score. Along the path that afternoon two sets of footprints marked the journey’s start. By day’s end, shadows darkened the retreating steps of only one.

There was a misty quiet at Gunsmoke that day, one only a man who had walked the woods as a boy could know. In the stillness was a whispered pledge, that the secrets of the forest are kept. But the forest would suppress the truth for only so long, for the paths taken by its visitors are recorded in every man’s soul, and the soul must ultimately have its say. And the just man his day.

*   *   *

It was nearing noon on June 2, 1976, when attorney Martin Dillon and his client Kendall Strawn wrapped up a real estate closing at County Bank in Montrose, Pennsylvania, a quiet hilltop town amid the Endless Mountains in the northeastern tip of the state. For the thirty-year-old Dillon, the workday was almost over.

As had become his custom in recent years, Marty took off most Wednesday afternoons to skeet-shoot with friends on a plot of land his parents owned and affectionately called Gunsmoke, about twelve miles northwest of Montrose. At the camp, the members of the Wednesday Afternoon Club, as Marty and his pals dubbed themselves, took turns shooting clay pigeons, with occasional breaks for beer and cigarettes.

Kendall Strawn didn’t live in the area and wasn’t part of the club, but he was a close friend, and today Marty Dillon wanted company. Leaning against Strawn’s Jeep in the parking lot, the young lawyer tried to cajole the burly thirty-six-year-old developer into an afternoon at the Dillon camp.

Come shoot with us, he urged Strawn. Couple of hours up at Gunsmoke. Come on. It’ll be fun.

Kendall Strawn wasn’t tempted. His mind was racing with all he had to get done that afternoon. Lately, he’d been working seven days a week managing his properties, in addition to running the farm he owned in Le Raysville, west of Montrose. He barely found time to spend with his wife, Joan, and baby daughter, Tami.

Marty, I just can’t, he said apologetically. I’m too busy.

Marty wasn’t giving up. What else do you have to do? he pressed.

For a moment Kendall thought he detected a touch of urgency in his friend’s voice, but then Marty smiled.

You don’t have anything to do, he told Kendall, teasing. Come on, let’s go shoot.

Three other friends, Marty explained, couldn’t make it. Gary Passmore, an administrator at Montrose General Hospital, canceled that morning; it was his wife’s birthday. Earle Wootton, publisher of the Montrose Independent newspaper, left a message saying he was too busy. And John Dabulewicz, an X-ray technician at the hospital, said he, too, had to pass.

That left Marty with just one member of the Wednesday Afternoon Club—Dr. Stephen Scher, an allergist at Montrose General.

Kendall Strawn grasped the situation at once, but since Marty didn’t volunteer anything further he decided not to ask. In the past, when Kendall had offered his opinion, he’d gotten the impression that Marty didn’t always appreciate his candor. And so now, when Dr. Stephen Scher’s name was mentioned, Kendall tread cautiously. A husband’s denial, he knew, was a powerful force.

*   *   *

After Kendall drove off, Marty Dillon headed to his law office at the top of Public Avenue, just a few doors away from the bank. Since he returned to his hometown after graduating from law school five years earlier, he’d landed a prime partnership with Robert Dean, one of the most respected attorneys in Susquehanna County. Marty’s practice was particularly busy. Land prices in the area had begun rising in the early 1970s, and the local economy was thriving. Many chose to live in the town of two thousand lined with lakefront, hundred-year-old Victorian homes and commute to jobs in cities like Binghamton, New York, twenty miles north, or Scranton, Pennsylvania, thirty miles south. Marty handled as many as a dozen real estate closings a week while his criminal defense practice continued to grow.

At his desk that afternoon, Marty Dillon thumbed through motions for a homicide case in which he’d been appointed public defender. It was to be the young lawyer’s first murder trial. His client was accused of beating a Choconut, Pennsylvania, man to death, and the evidence against him was compelling. It wasn’t going to be easy.

Marty was having difficulty concentrating on the case. He’d been fighting the tension that had been building all day, ever since Gary Passmore called to say he couldn’t make it to camp. Dillon’s spirits rose once that day when his secretary, Bonnie Mead, told him he had a call from Anthony Amendola, an old friend who’d moved to Florida but was back in town for the week. Marty reached for the phone, relieved.

What are you doing today? he asked immediately.

Amendola explained he had a business meeting that afternoon and dinner plans in the evening.

Marty paid no attention. We’re going out to camp to do some shooting. Do you want to go?

Amendola couldn’t, and Marty’s hopes dimmed. By now, there wasn’t anyone left to ask.

In the quiet of his office, Marty Dillon pushed the swirling doubts from his mind, a technique he’d all but perfected in the past two years. As he left for Gunsmoke that June day, he stopped by Bonnie Mead’s desk and told her and the other young women in the office a joke. Their laughter echoed in the back room as Marty pulled the front door closed behind him.

On the way to his car, Marty ran into Pennsylvania state troopers John Fekette and John Salinkas, and the three men chatted briefly about the murder trial. Then Marty got into his red BMW and headed just half a mile down Church Street, pulling into the driveway of number 85, a white, wooden two-family house across the street from Montrose General Hospital. Retrieving a change of clothes from the car, Marty Dillon climbed the front porch steps to the home of Dr. Stephen Scher.

The doctor stood in the doorway. In jeans, a blue and white striped long-sleeved shirt, and a brown jacket, the six-foot-one, 245-pound physician cast an imposing figure, his straight brown hair lightly framed in gray, his small, intense brown eyes shrouded behind wire-rimmed glasses. Although heavyset and somewhat unkempt in appearance, the thirty-six-year-old Scher exuded an almost militant self-assuredness. Some called it arrogance and did not much care for the doctor. But others in Montrose, particularly women, thought highly of Scher. Recently separated from his wife, Ann, the doctor kept an active social calendar.

Marty went inside to change out of his suit into brown corduroy pants, a blue shirt, tan leather vest, and brown boots. If he was uneasy in the doctor’s home, he hid it aptly. He’d become quite skilled at that; he’d had plenty of practice. And today, like so many times before, it seemed easier to go along with the plans than to explain his reluctance: Marty Dillon was without a doubt a nonconfrontational man.

Besides, he reminded himself, the past didn’t matter anymore. Just a week or so earlier, the ultimatum had been issued, the promise made. Marty had prevailed.

And so when he emerged from the house, even though Scher had already loaded the guns and ammunition into his own gray Ford and was seated in the driver’s seat, Marty took his first step toward securing a different course in his relationship with Stephen Scher. The young lawyer motioned to his BMW. We’ll take my car, he called out to the doctor.

If the gesture appeared small, for Marty Dillon it was not. It was behind the wheel of his sports car that Marty was able to take control. It was what he loved about cars, maneuvering the curves, speeding along the hilly country roads he knew so well. He’d been in the passenger seat for too long. On June 2, 1976, Marty Dillon believed that had changed at last.

By three-thirty the BMW veered past the Susquehanna County Court of Common Pleas at the top of Public Avenue. After a quick stop at the Forest Lake Inn to pick up a six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon, the two men proceeded to Route 267 for the fifteen-minute drive to Silver Lake Township, eventually turning onto Russin Road, a dirt path up the mountain. As they sped past the modest white-shingled home of Andrew Russin, a sixty-five-year-old retired mechanical engineer, Marty beeped the horn once, and Russin, weeding in his garden, looked up and waved. The older man lived with his wife, Anna, and their twenty-one-year-old mentally disabled son, David, and kept an eye on Gunsmoke for the Dillons. In the past, Russin had trekked up to the property after he’d heard persistent shooting, assuming trespassers were hunting on the land: So now, when Marty visited he always let his neighbor know he was around.

Dr. Scher got out of the car to unfasten the cable on the gate at the entrance to the Dillon property, and the gravel on the dirt road flew as the BMW raced the final mile, pulling to a stop in front of a trailer surrounded by dense woods. The two men unloaded the car, bringing hamburger meat, ketchup, relish, bread, and chips into the makeshift kitchen for a barbecue that evening. The trailer was modestly furnished—mostly a place to rest, use the bathroom, and grab a cold beer.

They sat on the porch, opened beers, and smoked cigarettes. They talked about Marty’s murder case: The young lawyer had questions about head injuries, and the doctor told him what he knew. They discussed Dr. Scher’s upcoming trip to Knoxville with Gary Passmore to visit a mutual friend. Dillon and Scher agreed it was a good thing that Passmore had remembered his wife’s birthday and skipped going to Gunsmoke that day.

Then the two men each put a beer in their jacket pockets and walked a couple of hundred feet up a wooded path to a clearing, carrying the guns, clay birds, and the skeet machine. Marty brought along his sunglasses and a pair of gray-and-black ear protectors. They set up the skeet at the edge of the field near a tree stump and for a short time took turns shooting ten birds each—first Scher, then Dillon. They each drank another beer, ate potato chips, and smoked some more. Marty preferred Winstons, the doctor, Marlboros.

It was just before six p.m.

At 7 Kelly Street in Montrose, Marty’s two children waited for him to return home that evening. Suzanne would turn three in a few weeks. Five-year-old Michael loved race cars, just like his dad.

And Pat, Marty’s wife. A stunning woman, everyone said so. Pat was home, too, waiting for the man she loved.

Marty Dillon reached for the clay birds, holding one in each hand. His shirt caught the breeze, billowing slightly away from his body. His foot turned inward as he squatted by the machine. Wearing the gray-and-black ear protectors and sunglasses, he lowered his head. It was his turn to load the skeet.

Dr. Stephen Scher stood about four feet away. He reached for a number 4 shell; it was far more powerful than the number 8s they’d been using all day, the shells ordinarily used for skeet. He loaded his 16-gauge shotgun, cocked it, and took aim. It was his turn to fire.

CHAPTER 2

The shotgun blast tore into Marty Dillon’s chest, entering just above the sternum and instantly destroying his heart. Blood spattered on his clothes, the instep of his left boot, the ear protectors and sunglasses he wore, and the tree stump beside him. Microscopic droplets were expelled into the air at least five feet, far enough to settle onto the jeans and boots of Dr. Stephen Scher.

In the stillness of Gunsmoke the body of Martin Thomas Dillon dropped facedown on the ground, the clay pigeons falling from his hands. The echo of the gunshot blast faded, and once again there was only silence.

Dr. Stephen Scher drew a sharp breath. Just weeks earlier, Patricia Dillon had ended their yearlong affair, after her husband had at last demanded that she make a choice. And she had. She would stay in the marriage. She would stop seeing the doctor.

But now, in a moment, in the pull of a trigger, that decision had been reversed. Two lives collided in the blast of a shotgun. Now all that remained was for the victor to take all.

In the mind of Dr. Stephen Scher, it was his due. He was, after all, a physician—a healer, they called him. He would now have the life he wanted, the life that had belonged to Martin Dillon.

It was by chance that Scher’s opportunity arose: alone with Dillon, unexpectedly. A couple of beers for courage. A shotgun. A hurried plan. How effortlessly it came together, how natural it felt to step into another man’s dreams.

*   *   *

But now, as the sun dipped lower into the Endless Mountains, a single focus emerged for Dr. Stephen Scher: self-preservation. Before the first telephone rang in Montrose, before state troopers arrived to cordon off the scene, the coroner was called, the families were notified, and the newspapers were alerted, the explanation must be ready. With the mistaken belief that the secrets of the forest were forever kept, the possibilities began to tick in the mind of Stephen Barry Scher.

With a single push, the doctor rolled the body of his rival onto its back. He laid down the 16-gauge Winchester several feet away, the muzzle pointed toward his victim’s head. He bent over and untied Marty’s right shoelace. As he prepared to leave, in his final moment alone at Gunsmoke, Stephen Scher reached into the young lawyer’s pocket and removed his car keys.

This time, Scher would drive.

*   *   *

At first, Andrew Russin didn’t recognize the tall, husky man at the door. The Russins didn’t get too many visitors, living way up a dirt and gravel road in Silver Lake Township as they did. The older man had just quit gardening after his wife, Anna, called him in for supper. He hadn’t heard the BMW pull into the driveway, just a sharp rap at the front windowpane.

There was an accident and Marty’s dead, the stranger said, his voice expressionless. He was shot.

Russin swiftly made the connection. He’d met Dr. Scher once, not long ago, up at Gunsmoke when the Wednesday Club members were shooting skeet. Marty had been particularly upbeat that day, even inviting the older man to join the group. Russin was fond of the young attorney. The doctor’s announcement was hard to believe.

Are you sure he’s dead? he asked.

Scher nodded.

Russin noticed a ring of blood around the doctor’s mouth. What did you do, try to give him artificial respiration? he asked.

Scher told him he had. Then he added that Russin needed to call for help.

As Scher waited in the kitchen, Andrew Russin phoned the Silver Lake Ambulance Squad and reported an accident at Gunsmoke. When he reappeared, Scher asked him to return with him to the Dillon property, and the older man agreed, beckoning to his son David to join them.

Before they left, Russin turned to Scher. Do you want to wash up? he asked. There’s a bathroom right here.

Scher refused. As the men began to leave, Anna Russin stopped her husband at the door. Here, take this, she said softly, holding out a worn blanket. "Cover